So I was sitting up, reading about questioning God, purpose in life, etc. I really like the way Rob Bell puts it in Velvet Elvis.

"Questions are not scary.

What is scary is when people don't have them.

What is tragic is faith that has no room for them......

And this is why questions are so central to faith. A question by its very nature acknowledges that the person asking the question does not have all the answers. And because the person does not have all of the answers, they are looking outside themselves for guidance........

David says this to God in Psalms 13: "How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? Look on me and answer"

Questions. Questions. Questions.

Central to the Christian experience is the art of questioning God. Not belligerent, arrogant questions that have no respect for our maker, but naked, honest, vulnerable, raw questsion arising in the awe that comes from engaging the living God.

This type of questioning frees us. Frees us from having to have it all figured out. Frees us from having answers to everything. Frees us from always having to be right. It allows us to have moments when we come to the end of our ability to comprehend. Moments when the silence is enough.

The Christian faith is mysterious to the core. It is about things and beings that ultimately cannot be put into words. Language fails. And if we do definitively put God into words, we have at that very moment made God something God is not."

I like that he views questioning God, something I do a lot of, as something essential and necessary, rather than something taboo and wrong. And he even makes it clear that even if you do get an answer, there will always be another question. The questions never stop simply because God is more than we can see, feel, imagine, or understand. We serve someone so powerful He is beyond comprehension.

Later in the book Rob Bell points out we all think that we don't do enough with our lives. That we're always missing something. Not good enough. Not our ideal perfect. Life isn't what we want it to be. But he points out that along the way people tend to pick up an ideal of how they should be...

"They have this image they picked up over the years of how they are supposed to act and look and work and play and talk, and it's like a voice that never stops shouting in their ear."

He says, as he was told, that the only way to overcome that is "to kill your superwhatever" and go about life doing simply the only thing we were created to do..."Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God made you to be"

Both of those passages spoke quite a bit to me about various things going on in life right now and I just thought I'd share them.